Phil Shapiro of PC World seems to think St. Louis is a prime location to begin Google’s Gigabit Fiber project.

“I don’t work for Google, but if I did … I would announce St. Louis as the first city to be chosen for Google’s gigabit fiber-optic experiment. St. Louis is known as the “Gateway to the West.” That gateway could also be the gateway to our future – a more inclusive, educated, healthful, hopeful, and well-functioning future.”

Thanks Phil, we agree.

It’s April Fool’s day. You have to be careful what you read on the internet.

Remember when we wrote about Google gigabit internet in St. Louis? Google asked cities to make a case for themselves and Topeka decided to change it’s name to Google, KS. And for today, if you google something you’re actually ‘Topeka-ing‘ it. Pretty funny, Google.

There are quite a few other stories floating around about ABC, CBS, NYT and WSJ switching all of their content to HTML5. While these may seem like far-fetched April Fool’s jokes, some of them are actually a few days old and likely true. It seems Brightcove, the company that provides video for Time, NYT and others, has switched their framework to support HTML5 video and thus render Flash passé.

Fine with us. Shortly after writing Flash vs iPad, Taylor downloaded the latest beta iPhone/iPad SDK and started working on some cool, non-Flash apps.

From Engadget:

The momentum towards HTML5 and away from (or at least in parallel with) Flash seems to be accelerating with today’s launch of the free Brightcove Experience framework for HTML5 — a “way to publish, distribute, and monetize web video for the iPad and other Apple devices” according to the Brightcove press release. While Brightcove might not be a household name, some of its 1,000 customers, including Time Inc. and The New York Times (a Brightcove investor), certainly are — both of whom are already using the new HTML5 solution in preparation for the iPad’s April 3rd US launch. A real coup for the Flash-hating Steve Jobs if you start factoring in the rumored Flash-free NPR and Wall Street Journal iPad sites as well as that little HTML5 iPad test CBS was testing out in the open last week.

It looks like Stevesy has won, or at least got most of the heavy hitters in publishing to come over to the Apple/HTML5 side.

This is no April Fool’s joke. You can now download iPad apps on the App Store. I just got the iWork suite.

It looks like St. Louis is making a serious bid to get Google’s high speed fiber network installed in the city. We’ve been shopping around for faster service lately and would love to see prices come down and speeds go up. It looks like Google wants them to go up a lot with mind boggling speeds of 1Gbps.

Google is asking for “interested communities” to apply, and launch markets will be announced later this year. Well Google, St. Louis is in!

Google is planning to build, and test ultra-high speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000, and potentially up to 500,000 people.

For more information visit Mayor Slay’s site and take his poll or head over to the Facebook Group, RFT, Business Journal or search it on Google.

Here’s Google explaining how it would work:

Show Your Support

To show your support for St. Louis visit this link: http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/

The following was posted on Mayor Slay’s website:

Google St. Louis, Please

Google caught our attention – and pretty much everyone else’s – with a pair of recent announcements. The international technology company announced last month that it planned to spend millions of dollars to build out (at least) one fiber network capable of speeds of 1 gigabit per second, about 20 to 100 times faster than any competitor’s. And it said that it was asking cities across the United States to signal their interest in being the test market.

The thought of super speedy Google broadband – and the chance to bring it home – has set off a wicked competition among broadband starved municipalities. Partisans in Topeka have dressed up in special t-shirts; celebratory songs have been commissioned; promotional coupons have been printed; mayors and councils have read resolutions changing their community’s names to Google; fans have launched FaceBook and YouTube (and pretty much any tool developed by Google) campaigns; and – in the background – teams of municipal IT professionals and engineers have been working feverishly pulling together the reams of documentation that Google has requested before the end of March.

Mayor Francis Slay, an inveterate blogger and user of Twitter, has told his readers and followers that he will also propose the City of St. Louis as the first home of the Google Fiber network. And City staffers, volunteers, planners, writers, and a committee of the Vanguard Cabinet have been hard at work on the St. Louis bid for several weeks. This week’s Mini-Poll is a part of that effort, because the pro-Googlers plan to use it to quantify the intensity of public interest in better and wider broadband access. And they hope to see if changing the name of the city for a day or two to something Googlesque would meet with your approval.

Continue on to Mayor Slay’s official site to take the poll and make sure to visit Google to tell them why we need their service in Saint Louis.

Lets make this happen.

-james

I got an email from Google the other day. It seems they are phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6. Here’s the email.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

We made a little video back in 2008 with our opinion of IE6. Check it out on YouTube. It’s time to upgrade your browser to Safari, FireFox or Chrome. Visit the links, pick one and get ready for a better internet.

http://www.google.com/search?q=atomicdust

Google launched it’s version of real time search results in December of 2009. Basically, it aggregates everything it finds from blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites into a little scrolling window on the SERP (search engine results page.)

Here’s how Google describes it on their blog.

First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

I was looking at our analytics and doing some searches when I noticed that Atomicdust now has a coveted “Latest results for Atomicdust.”